No film captured my imagination as a teenager the way ‘Eternal Sunshine of A Spotless Mind’ did. A couple, heartbroken and exhausted of each other after a break-up, decide that they want nothing to do with each other. So much so that they don’t even want to remember they were ever a part of each others’ lives. They decide to take the services offered by the New York city ‘Lacuna’, where they ask you for all belongings you have that remind you of a person in your life, and then plug you up in some machine which systematically erases every single one of your memories of that person, starting from the recent ones all the way back to when you met them.
However, as the machine is deleting the guy’s memories, it is doing a replay of them in his head and as soon as it reaches the initial, sweeter memories, he realises he doesn’t actually want to forget her and wants to earn her back. He tries his best to hide her memories in other, unrelated corners of his mind where the machine memory erasers can’t touch them. At the end of it, he manages to retain one crucial bit of information which leads him back to her.
Apart from the romance of it all, what has always intrigued me is if there actually could be some sort of machine that simply erases a person’s existence from your brain? Because there sure are some exes I would like to forget!
That’s why, when I learnt of something called concept cells in the brain, something clicked. What are they? How do they work? And most importantly, can they be eliminated to get rid of certain, ahem, concepts from my brain? Concept cells are cells housed primarily in the medial temporal lobe, especially the hippocampus, entorhinal cortex, and the amygdala, which respond to specific people, objects, or ideas regardless of which modality in which they are presented. You could be looking at a picture of Kate Winslet, hearing her voice in a video, or even simply be looking at a picture of the Titanic, and the same cells would fire. Thus, these cells don’t just represent specific features, rather, they are representative of abstract concepts, making them crucial for abstraction, generalization, and discrimination from other concepts. They are also quite efficient in representing concepts because they form new concepts quite quickly, they respond to a variety of modalities, be it pictures, spoken words, or written, and also they utilise something called ‘sparse coding’, in which only few neurons fire for a particular concept, but strongly.
Coming to the real questions, can these neurons be eliminated to get rid of a concept? These cells are quite selective, which means that a certain set of them will respond very strongly to only one concept and quite weakly or not at all to others. This would imply that there may actually be a way to do away with some of these and forget unwanted people. However, there is some degree of overlap between related concepts. There is something called ‘semantic clustering’, which means that cells that fire for similar concepts, are located close together in the brain. So say, if you were to erase Kate Winslet from your memory, you run the risk of also forgetting Leonardo di Caprio, or at least have some sort of lacuna (that was definitely deliberate) in his concept. Additionally, concept cells are also part of a larger memory network. Eliminating some may erase or weaken certain memories, but because memory is also distributed across the brain, not all traces of it would vanish.
So, the verdict unfortunately is no. I cannot simply erase my exes from memory and will have to forever live with the memories. Consequences of my own stupid decisions I guess!
